


A Heartbeat Just For You

by Peapods



Series: The Fire Thief [2]
Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Leather Trousers, M/M, Pre-Series, Temporarily Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-11
Updated: 2018-01-11
Packaged: 2019-03-03 07:36:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13336482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Peapods/pseuds/Peapods
Summary: It takes Cooper nearly getting his ticket punched by a deranged FBI agent to force Albert into realizing that he likes Cooper a little more than is considered normal for colleagues.





	A Heartbeat Just For You

The tight feeling in his chest and the stark clarity of sound are not what Albert is expecting when he stares into Cooper’s hospital room and sees the tube sticking out of his throat. 

He can’t breathe on his own. 

Albert has the folder in his hands and he’s talking to McDonald and Diane is sitting in the mauve chair across from him strangling a pack of cigarettes and things are being done.

But part of him isn’t even here. Part of him is watching the accordion puffing up and down, reminding him that Cooper isn’t breathing on his own.

McDonald has left, he suddenly realizes, and Diane is standing in front of him. Without her usual heels, she is shorter than him, though not by much. Her mouth is pursed, concerned. Her eyes are flinty.

“Can you do this?” she asks. 

His face, he knows, is composed. He can see it in the reflection of the hospital room's window. He doesn’t know why she’s asking, doesn’t know if she can hear the unsteady cadence of his heart.

“Fine,” he answers shortly.

Her head twitches, her eyes shifting. Whatever she sees in him, she doesn’t seem to find reassuring judging by the way her face doesn’t change. But she nods anyway and turns her attention back to the man behind the glass, whose life is being measured by artificial beeping and the hiss of a ventilator.

Albert counts the beats and then turns and walks away. He has work to do.

*****

It has been two weeks and Albert is being forced to go home. He puts in for time because there really is nothing else he can do until Cooper wakes up. The work schedule hasn’t been particularly kind and he’s coming off a hacking cough that had kept him well away from the living.

It has been a good excuse to stay away from the hospital.

Something keeps compelling him to go. Most anyone who knows Cooper has been to see him. He’s well-liked, if considered a bit eccentric, and no one in the FBI likes to see their own attacked. Albert doesn’t know why this has hit _him_ so hard. Cooper is a friend and colleague, but detachment is a part of Albert’s life.

He can’t seem to hold onto it.

Janet in HR takes the paperwork with suspicion--he hasn’t so much as taken a personal day since he was transferred--but says nothing. He has almost escaped when he is cornered by Diane.

“You should go,” she tells him without preamble, pulling his briefcase from his hand and helping him on with his trench. 

“The hell are you talking about?”

“The hospital. You haven’t been since he was admitted.”

“Did he wake up?”

“No.”

“Has he not been thoroughly scoured for physical evidence?”

“Of course he has.”

“Then why the he--”

“Because you need to,” she says matter of factly. She’s wearing heels and she’s his height or a little taller and she is harder to ignore this way. Albert is wary of her. Diane has never expressed much approval of him. She has given him a hard time more than once about his refusal to carry a gun. But she’s got this look like she can see right through all the prickliness. She can detect bullshit from a mile away and has no compunctions about calling people on theirs. “You’ve spent the last two weeks giving new meaning to the term ‘hostile work environment’ and the locals are all restless. You need to go see him. Soak up some up that zen.”

“What, he’s just exuding it unconsciously now? What I need is four Tylenol and about ten hours solid shut-eye,” he tells her, moving off. She lets him.

But instead of heading back to his apartment and 800 thread count sheets, he finds himself headed to the hospital. Cooper is still in a coma, but no longer ventilated. Albert is unaccountably grateful for the lack of hiss-puff from the machine that still sits ominously at his bedside. He stares at Cooper instead.

He’s lost weight that he couldn’t really afford to lose. The jawline that had reminded Albert of Cary Grant the first time he’d met Cooper is far too sharp and his cheekbones are waxy and highlighted by hollowed cheeks. He’d had to scrape Cooper’s nails, run the comb through his hair, carefully examine every piece of clothing. He’d been near enough to death that sunny morning that Albert had been almost certain he’d be relabeling everything to homicide before the end of the week. They still don't know who stabbed him. They'll have to wait until Cooper graces them with consciousness to have any inkling.

He settles in without meaning to. There's a magazine on the swing table--one of those scientific magazines for laymen. He picks it up, curious as to who is visiting Cooper and trying to keep up with the latest popular science at the same time.

He coughs suddenly, hard with a little phlegm. It doesn't carry the sting of earlier in the week. The culture he'd run--in order to assure Gordon he could keep working--had been free of infection, but he still has a jolt of panic that he'll set Cooper back. He quiets the cough as much as he can.

He flips through the magazine, stopping to skim a few articles, but now the cough is persistent and tickling, keeping him from getting too engrossed.

It’s during one of these jags that he notices Cooper mumbling. He’s out of the chair in moments, magazine on the floor, hands clenching the cold metal bars. 

“Coop?” he asks lowly. Cooper doesn’t acknowledge him even as his mouth moves. He leans in close. He has a small crisis of conscience and wonders if he should be listening to this when he hears “ _...it should have been me._ ”

Cooper lapses back into sleep and Albert is frozen in place.

His heart though. His heart is recoiling in his chest. His hands turn numb, unable to maintain the death grip on the bed rails.

He’d performed Caroline Earle’s autopsy two weeks ago. It hadn’t taken more than one stab to kill her. No defensive wounds. No sign she’d even woken up. She’d bled out in a matter of minutes.

Cooper.

He’s stuck on that thought.

Cooper had suffered. Felt every inch of his stab wound, had been practically holding his guts in when they found him. But he was alive. 

Albert leaves the room as suddenly as he arrived. He leaves the magazine on the floor. He practically stomps over an older man who is shuffling down the hallway with a cup of coffee. He briefly tells the night nurse that Cooper had woken up while he was in the room and doesn’t stop to watch her run to the room as he continues on his way.

_It should have been me._

*****

Albert slides the knife over the honing steel in quick, efficient strokes. He wipes the blade on a towel and reaches for the first tomato. His prep work saves him from bruised skins and mushy pulp. They’re perfectly ripe tomatoes, with good meat and few seeds, somewhat rare for the time of year. The onion is next and he dices quickly, looking briefly away as the released enzyme starts to make his eyes tingle. The serranos are next and he carefully washes his cutting board and hands afterward.

He crafts the pico with nothing less than his full attention. He tastes and adds more lime. He’s added too much so he adds more salt and coriander. He considers, briefly, adding garlic for an experiment, but discards the idea. He’s no chef. Better to stick with what he knows.

He sets the topping aside and begins preparing his tacos. The carnitas should be close to done. He shreds the cilantro and crumbles the cojita. His abuela would curse him, but he’s a fan of sour cream on basically anything, so he packs some into a baggie and snips the end, ready to pipe the stuff on top. 

He heats the griddle with oil and throws tortillas to land with a sizzle.

He assembles.

Albert focuses on each of the these tasks to the exclusion of all else. He ignores the ringing phone. He ignores whatever drastic news story is droning out of the radio. He ignores the way his teeth are grinding so hard he’ll have to pry his jaw open with WD-40 to get the tacos into his mouth.

The soothing voice of the news reader is no balm to the sharp, sudden sting of anger that heats up his scalp and bulges the veins in his neck. But his hands remain steady. Physical reactions of that nature are trained out of coroners and pathologists before they’re allowed near their first case. Albert had always been ahead of the curve.

He eats standing at the counter.

He finishes the tacos having tasted none of the delicate flavors he’d spent hours perfecting. The heat of the serranos, the precise spicing of the carnitas, and the freshness of the sour cream are all lost on him. As he finishes, he realizes that the confrontation is coming. It has been lurking for hours on the edge of his consciousness. And he must confront it. Avoidance has done little for him. The distraction of food and hunger have only given him time to mitigate a more disastrous reaction. 

The last time he’d been this angry he had busted a hand-carved statue his grandfather had brought over from France after escaping the Holocaust. 

He cleans by rote and then he is alone with his anger. Only now can he acknowledge that his anger is not with Cooper. The words Albert had overheard were not meant for him. They were not words of a man in full possession of his faculties. They were not words the man he’d met a year ago would ever had uttered.

Albert does not understand humanity. He knows death, hate, insanity, depravity, and violence. He has pledged his life and career to the combat of those human plagues. He knows them and he cannot understand humanity’s obsession with them. He thought he knew love and goodness, lived according to those principles.

He had not really known them until Cooper had aimed that sunny smile his way one ugly day at Albert’s first crime scene. Standing in that hospital room, listening to _it should have been me_ , Albert had felt a clobber to his heart. Thinking of losing Cooper, of replacing Caroline Earle’s body on the table with his, is like inviting anarchy into his thoughts and actions. There’s only one logical conclusion for why this has affected him so much.

He’s in love with Dale Cooper.

Son of a _bitch_.

*****

“A year! I’ve been here a damn year and they want to transfer me _again_?” He’s railing at one the lab grunts as he reads the memo the poor asshole has just delivered.

“You’re going because he’s going,” a calm, infuriatingly knowing voice says from the door of morgue.

The innocent, hapless, wide-eyed lab grunt takes the opportunity to flee Albert’s presence. Albert barely notices as he attempts to stare down the only person who has never been intimidated him--barring one other. He doesn’t even pretend at ignorance.

“He’s transferring?”

Diane shrugs, “Bad memories. He’s not like you. He’s a runner.”

Albert balks.

She puffs out a laugh, “I sometimes wonder if you know him at all.”

“I’ve known him a grand total of nine months, Diane, and we’ve worked together approximately three times. We’re not exactly bosom buddies.”

She stares at him with that same disbelief she’d had in the hospital, but this time, it seems, she is unwilling to let him hold onto illusions.

“People fall in love with him at the drop of a hat, you know?” she says casually. “They think he’s odd for a moment and then he gives them that fucking grin or, hell, just makes eye contact and suddenly they’re falling all over themselves for him.”

He opens his mouth to respond, but she’s too quick for him.

“But not you,” her voice tinged with pleasured surprise--surprising considering they are always at odds. “You fell for him as hard as anyone, but you’ve never let that blind you. It’s actually why I stopped giving you shit about not carrying a gun.”

“Thought that was because Cooper asked you to stop giving a shit,” he says gruffly, turning to rearrange instruments that absolutely don’t need rearranging.

“Dale’s defense of you was only confirmation that I’d be fighting a losing battle. You love him,” she said plainly. As if she’d just told him it was raining. “And I know a part of him can’t do the job without you. Ergo, transfer. You’ll go, because you have to go. And he’ll never question it. He never does.”

It sounds right. Cooper can’t be privy to the amount of loyalty he inspires. He is respectful of all. He knows others are not, but he doesn’t think his own attitude makes him superior, doesn’t think it excuses him to act the same. If Albert shows up in his Philly office on his first day on the job, Cooper won’t think anything of it. They’ll go on as they have done.

Albert doesn’t even bother trying to contradict her on … the other thing she said.

“Practically in another state,” he finally grumbles.

“Well, you do have to travel through Alabama,” she quips with a smile. “Philadelphia’s not so bad. You can be near the city.”

“And I'm just supposed to ignore the fact that I apparently have no say in my life.”

“If you weren't willing to subject yourself to this insanity, you wouldn’t have left San Francisco. Now, we’re just making it official.”

It's a low blow and Diane knows it and he’s sure part of her is dancing with glee. Gordon Cole may be one of the most irritating men in the Bureau to work for, but every agent worth their badge knew that if he came calling, you heeded the call. 

Gordon only wanted the best.

*****

A few months after the move to Philly, they are both called out to San Francisco for a series of murders. Young men. Young gay men. Albert stares down Gordon, but the older man meets his gaze without flinching.

Albert hasn’t had a date since he left the Bay and he reluctantly acknowledges that he blames Cooper for that. His feelings are incredibly inconvenient, almost certainly unrequited, and very probably affecting his better judgement. The temptation to use San Francisco as excuse to get back on the horse, so to speak, is enough to have him pack more than just his suits. Cases don’t allow much downtime, but Albert knows a couple of clubs will be open past the time all good field agents should be in bed.

Within a few hours of getting their hands on the body, Cooper has a working theory and a list of people he wants to interview. Albert begs off from these and instead works with Diane to find other victims who fit the bill. He’s staying in a hotel, but he knows better than to let his visit go unremarked and calls up a few old friends. They have been there for nearly a week when he finally gets a night out. There have been no new dead bodies. No new evidence. And yet, here Albert is.

“Honestly, I never expected _you_ of all people to end up working for the Feds,” Armando comments while ineffectually stirring his vodka tonic with a small straw. “Not after what happened with Mike.”

Mike’s murder had been entirely mishandled by the agents in charge.

“Being in the organization allows me to demand higher standards,” Albert counters. The bar is loud and full of men on the prowl, but Albert isn’t interested. Cooper had just figured out that their murderer had been on a spree from Illinois to San Francisco and targeting male prostitutes, most gay or tending toward it. Albert was using the meet up as much as to survey the situation as to catch up with his friend.

“Nothing catching your eye?”

“Not here for that,” Albert says gruffly.

“Oh no, honey, I know that look. You’ve got feelings for someone.”

Albert doesn’t deny it--Armando knows him too well--but he doesn’t confirm it either.

“Please tell me it’s not some slick agent who’d just as soon beat you up in an alley.”

“It’s not,” Albert says. Cooper would never beat him up in an alley.

“Good. You have disastrous taste in men.”

*****

“I feel the only option is to go undercover. I have made contact with someone who can get the proper attire.”

Albert hopes his expression conveys all the ways in which he thinks this is a shitty idea. Shitty, stupid, and fucking reckless. He’s got a whole host of words for it.

“So you think a pair of leather chaps and a mesh shirt are all you need to fit in at a gay bar?” he asks acerbically as he examines the photos of the mysterious fiber sent by the local lab.

“I imagine that my presence at a gay bar will be enough to signal my interest,” Cooper argues.

Albert doesn’t want him to fail, but it is tempting to tell Cooper all the ways in which he is wrong. Instead, he shows up in his hotel room at 9PM and has to swallow his tongue when he sees Cooper in a form fitting pair of leather pants and a black t-shirt that looks like it has been painted on. He’s like every gay man’s wet dream.

Albert tosses a bag on the bed and tells Cooper to tuck in the shirt and mess up his hair and leaves post haste. He’d brought Cooper a leather wrist cuff and a chain for his wallet, had been ready to suck it up and make Cooper ready for this, but goddamn those pants.

Cooper hadn't requested back-up, but Albert is not going to let Cooper walk into this situation with so much naivety about what was going to happen inside that club. He tears off his suit and pulls on a turtleneck and jeans. He glances out the window and sees Cooper’s car still in the lot, so he takes the chance to leave early.

Club Y is just as he remembers it when he’d had a fake ID and a shitty boyfriend. He sets himself up in a corner where he can see everything and Cooper will be unaware of him. He doesn’t tempt himself with a drink beyond a scotch that he can easily nurse for two hours. 

Cooper draws nearly every eye as he walks in. “Walk” being a very loose definition for the slink of his colleague’s hips. Albert is almost offended by how Cooper has transformed himself. His shoulders are still rounded back, but he no longer looks like an upstanding member of law enforcement. He looks like a man who knows that every eye is on him and is completely comfortable with that.

Over the next few hours, Albert watches him accept drinks and dances, and have earnest conversations. When he steps outside to take puffs off of other men’s cigarettes, Albert leaves. He’s not needed. Cooper has this under control and is only gathering information.

He doesn’t go back to the hotel. He goes to another bar and finds the first willing man who will exchange blow jobs in the restroom. After seeing Cooper and sucking the stranger’s cock, he’s a hair trigger and comes almost immediately, biting down on Cooper’s name. No one would have heard it, the music is loud and other couples are utilizing the restroom for their own purposes, but Albert can’t acknowledge that he’s using someone--and that he’ll never get to yell Cooper’s name with honesty.

He’s back at the hotel before Cooper and exhausted. He pops an ibuprofen and collapses in bed, feeling loathsome and lonely.

He doesn’t sleep for a long time.

*****

Cooper is insistent on going out the next night as well and Gordon has authorized more agents to help out now that Cooper knows what he might be looking for. 

“Alright, but I’m coming with this time,” Albert tells him.

“I would appreciate the back-up, Albert,” Cooper says, completely innocently. “While I’m certain the agents the San Francisco office have provided will be professional and competent, I would feel more comfortable with you at my back.”

They arrive separately and Albert tells Cooper that he’ll keep an eye out outside. He chain smokes and gives Cooper updates at the bar as he gets his club sodas and Albert gets cheap beers. He makes friends with the other chain-smokers and makes up a story about a friend of his and a john in a blue sedan. One of them, a big bear with a beard down to his navel notes that there’s been a blue Ford sedan circling for the past hour.

“Guess he hasn’t found something he likes, then,” Albert says before moving inside.

The club is teeming with people at this hour and Albert has a hard time finding Cooper. When he does, he curses. He’s hemmed in on both sides by two attractive men, one with his hands curled possessively around Cooper’s hips.

He growls under his breath and stalks over. With two looks, he warns both of them off before turning Cooper and backing him up into the nearby restroom. There are no stalls open so he presses him against the wall, crowds in close, and sticks his nose in Cooper’s neck, blatantly sniffing him as he skims up to his ear. He notes the way the other man’s hands reflexively grip his back. There’s a man getting a blow job next to the urinal and he’s watching them.

“Light blue Ford has been circling the club for nearly an hour. So much for the local Feds. Wanna go find out if you’re his type?”

Cooper’s breathing is a little unsteady as replies, “10-4. Alert the others?”

“Sure thing,” Albert says, before briefly losing his mind and kissing Cooper hard on the mouth. He leaves him there, trying to appear more calm and collected than he is. He had to do it--the only way to keep a cover, to convince those men that Cooper just hadn’t been quite as willing as Albert wanted--but he’s cursing himself, thinking of all the other ways to get that across without kissing someone who clearly wasn’t expecting it and clearly wasn’t gay.

He goes back outside and lights up. He watches Cooper exit the club and take a spot on the curb where he’s practically spotlighted by a street lamp. The Ford, when it comes back around, goes straight for him. He watches Cooper talk through the open window for a few minutes before straightening up again. The Ford drives off and there’s a scream. 

Cooper is already running for his vehicle as a newly arrived Dodge Dart tears off into the night. Albert can’t get to him or his own car fast enough and instead collars one of the agents and tells him to radio back up. 

When they catch up to Cooper, they find him standing near a destroyed hedgerow, looking comically chagrined as a cursing man sits cuffed on the curb.

“Did you forget how stopping works?” Albert asks as the other agent puts the suspect in the car. The car looks like it skidded around before crashing into a low wall. He looks back at Cooper, but the other agent looks none the worse for wear, not even slightly rattled. If Albert were a violent man, he might have punched him.

“I do believe I have a complaint to file with the rental agency. The brakes went out.”

“You keep getting into these situations and you’re going to scare decades off my life. Why the hell did I agree to put up with you?” he asks rhetorically, hot with anger.

“I will admit, some fear did grip me as I realized I no longer had full control of the vehicle. It has been so difficult to find balance again. I thought I would feel numb. I am glad for the fear.”

“Fear tells you where the edges are,” Albert agrees edgily, not expecting Cooper to be so honest about this. He needs to change the subject. There’s too much packed into that statement for Albert to deal with right now.

“Sorry about the, uh, bathroom. I needed to make it look like you just weren’t into what I wanted not like we were clandestinely planning a sting.”

“You have nothing to apologize for, Albert, I fully understood the situation,” Cooper says with a hand in the air, forestalling any other comment. “In a safe space such as Club Y, it was imperative not to disturb or otherwise commandeer the space. Regardless of our intentions, I doubt the patrons would have been ready to host us.”

Cooper doesn’t ask how Albert knew what to do and Albert is unaccountably annoyed. He also doesn’t mention the almost certainly obvious hard-on Albert had pressed into him and he is unrelentingly grateful.

*****

When they wrap up the case, Albert has one last night out with Armando. 

“There is a guy,” Albert admits. “But it’s nothing. He’s not gay and I learned that lesson a long time ago.”

Armando takes a long look at Albert over the top of his glass. “But yet you’re telling me about it. Which means this is no small crush.”

“No.”

Armando sighs, “Disastrous taste. Tell me he’s at least a good guy.”

“He’s one of the best men I’ve ever known.”

“Jesu Cristo,” his friend blows out with a deep sigh. “You’re in it deep, huh. So I shouldn’t be rustling up some boys to see if they want to move east?”

“Leave the boys unrustled.” Albert finishes his beer. “I’ll get over it. Eventually. In the meantime, I’ll just torture myself unnecessarily.”

“Well, at least you know yourself well enough to know that,” Armando agrees.

*****

Federal agents don’t rate first class even if they’re Gordon Cole’s Golden Boys. So when Diane collects them both from the airport, Albert is in a worse mood than usual. There had been two constantly whining babies on that flight. He’s ready to swear that even Cooper had started to look annoyed by mid-flight.

He and Diane live proximate to one another so Cooper is dropped off first with a perfunctory “Good work, Albert,” thrown threw the open door before he’s bounding up the steps to his building. Albert waves vaguely and settles back into his seat with a sigh.

Diane isn’t even willing to wait until they’re at his place with a drink before starting in. “So how fucking good did he look in the leather pants?”

Albert groans.

“That good, huh?”

“You’re a menace.”

“Did you get a picture?”

“I hate you.”

“Really, how was the case?”

Albert rubs his eyes. “Well, if I hadn’t already outed myself as a gay man, I’m sure I did myself no favors with that trip. Jesus, Diane.”

“Well, if it makes you feel any better, he didn’t say anything in his tapes.”

It makes him feel marginally better. If Diane had heard about the bathroom kiss, he’d never hear the end of it and he can’t decide if she’d be pleased or slap him for thinking he could just kiss Dale Cooper out of some weird need to adhere to gay club culture. If she’d heard about the hard-on, she wouldn’t have been surprised.

“He crashed a car.”

“Heard about that.”

“I didn’t even yell at him for it.”

That’s what earns him her incredulous stare.

“That’s one way to let him know about your big gay crush on him.”

Albert has been yelling at Cooper about his lack of self-preservation instincts practically since they met. He knows it’s a problem that suddenly he can’t yell. He can’t let Cooper know how fucking scared he is that one day it’ll be him in the body bag on Albert’s table.

“Albert, he may never be ready and he may never love you like you do,” he shifts in his seat, ready to do battle on whatever kind of self-help bullshit she’s about to spout until she says, “But fuck if I’m not rooting for you and let me tell you how hard that is after knowing you.”

“Well, do yourself a favor and refrain from playing the odds in Vegas,” he says, opening the door. They’re not really friends, but not really adversaries so he asks, “You want a drink?”

“You have anything besides scotch?”

“There’s a bottle of tequila in the freezer.”

“Done.”

Diane eschews any mixer or fruit--it’s all pretty sad looking now anyway--and shoots the tequila straight. Albert pours his scotch and flips on the turntable. To moody jazz, he nurses the drink with a scowl. 

“You know he went to an all-men’s college?” Diane asks suddenly.

“So?”

Diane shrugs and Albert fixes her with an unimpressed look, “Please spare me the ideas that whatever illicit smut novel you’ve been reading has put in your head.” He takes a sip of scotch. As loquacious as Albert can be when confronted by humanity’s stupidity, he finds himself more reticent when it comes to himself. “I’ve done this before, Diane: fallen in love with the unattainable straight man. I can acknowledge those feelings while still recognizing the reality that nothing will ever come of it.”

“But can you box it up? Put it away and keep it from affecting the job?”

“Do you think I can’t?”

“I think you’re not very good at keeping a lid on yourself. But I think, to stay here, with him, you’ll never let on.”

He slouches against the counter and sighs in agreement. He’s in love with Dale Cooper. He wants to keep working with Dale Cooper. Cooper has the self-preservation instincts of a lemming. He’s going to have to learn to live with that. 

“I’ll learn,” he tells her. “To stay near- to be able to help him, I’ll learn.”

**Author's Note:**

> As in "When the Light Gets into Your Heart," there's a lot of My Life My Tapes in this one. I don't think you need to have read it for enjoyment, but there are a couple fun Easter eggs in there if you have.


End file.
